Netherworld of Nostalgia
I’ve a strong interest in demons, for a science journalist, finding figures such as Moloch and Pazuzu compelling as cultural phenomena and useful as metaphors. “Facing one’s demons”—examining personal histories, motivations and traumas—is one concept made vivid by invocation of the infernal.
Andrew McCarthy, actor from the 1980s “Brat Pack,” pursues such demons in his absorbing documentary Brats, available on Hulu. I saw The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire in my college years but didn’t know the “Brat Pack” coinage dates to a 1985 New York magazine article by David Blum that negatively impacted some of the so-labeled actors personally and career-wise. Brats, in which McCarthy interviews his onetime colleagues such as Rob Lowe and Demi Moore, as well as Blum, has been criticized as a “therapy session,” but McCarthy’s emotional stake bolsters the subject’s interest. My wife and I were caught up sufficiently to later watch Pretty in Pink, which I didn’t know if I’d ever seen (I hadn’t).
The Faustian bargain—selling one’s soul to a demonic tempter in exchange for worldly gratification—has long held an interest for me, also dating to the 1980s, when I first encountered Boito’s Mefistofele, one of my favorite operas, and read Goethe’s Faust in an NYU course on German literature in translation. In 1989, Spy magazine ran a cover story describing figures such as Gloria Steinem and Ed Koch as Faust-like in prioritizing fame or wealth over onetime principles. “By definition, Faust cannot be the Devil himself,” as the role requires initial innocence, the article noted, giving an example: “Donald Trump is a lot of things—a short-fingered vulgarian, a Queens-born casino profiteer—but a Faust isn’t one of them.”
Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, by Ed Simon, is an engaging look at how the idea of a diabolical deal has captured imaginations over centuries, with the biblical figure of Simon Magus, and Christ’s temptation by Satan in the desert, long pre-dating the real-world Johann Faust, whose arcane activities inspired folklore, a play by Christopher Marlowe, and an expanding cultural phenomenon. One learns a lot from this wide-ranging book, though Simon’s stabs at social commentary—in which capitalism, AI and climate change are all Faustian—strike me as less interesting than his looks at various, sometimes little-known, writers, artists and musicians. I was nonplussed by a cursory treatment of Boito’s opera, but absorbed by the story of the bluesman Robert Johnson, reputed to have made a supernatural transaction granting him extraordinary musical abilities and influence, in exchange for his life ending at age 27 via a jealous husband’s poisoned whiskey.
A few months before Spy focused on Faustian deals, the magazine published a cartoon, conceived by my brother and drawn by me, that showed a TV announcer hold up a plastic bottle and say, “America’s fine washables can’t afford that risk,” with caption: “Detergent goes negative.” That was a joke about the 1988 presidential election, in which (as an instant media cliché put it) the candidates would “go negative” in their advertising. Our unexpected success in getting a cartoon published on our first try inspired numerous other attempts, targeting The New Yorker rather than Spy. On reflection, there was something Faustian in our ambition to get cartoons published in that prestigious venue. The New Yorker would send form rejection letters that, in one case, had some illegible scribbling that seemed to say the latest submission was a near-miss, from some Mephistophelean cartoon editor.
Cartooning was a dead end. Years later, I sent a cartoon to New York Press, institutional forerunner of Splice Today. This cartoon was about the termination of my employment at Lou Dobbs’ Space.com, and in retrospect I can’t imagine it could’ve been funny, or even made sense, to a broad readership. Still, I sent an email asking about its status and got a reply from an editor, John Strausbaugh, telling me—emphasized by an exclamation point—to look at the next issue. I did, and the cartoon wasn’t there. Perhaps the green box on the street carried a faint odor of brimstone.
In confronting the past, one must be careful not to dwell there too long. McCarthy does a good job of coming to terms with his Brat Pack experiences, telling Blum, the New York writer, that his article, which had upset McCarthy for many years, was in some respects a “blessing,” enabling reflection and reunions. Molly Ringwald, who starred opposite him in Pretty in Pink, in which she was great, declined an interview, a decision that McCarthy characterizes understandingly: “I asked Molly if she liked to speak. She said she’d think about it, but she’d like to just keep looking forward.”
—Follow Kenneth Silber on X: @kennethsilber